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Friday, August 19, 2011

My First Homeschool Post; AKA Our Curriculum for the Year

Well, here we go. My first official homeschool post. I thought I'd share what we are using this year as our curriculum. As you can see I have laid out MOST of our curriculum on my kitchen table for your viewing pleasure. In addition to what you see here we will be receiving kits for Music Appreciation, Art, PE, Typing, and Spelling in the mail from Harmony Education. Now, let's delve into the stuff you SEE.

Elemental Science (bottom left): Both girls will be doing Elemental Science this year. We're excited to try it out. It looks like a lot of fun and comes highly recommended by my friend. We are doing Biology this year so we'll be studying Animals, the Human Body, and Plants. We have already started our first project of growing butterflies!!!

Singapore Math (top left): Audrey will be doing levels 2A and B. Marissa will be doing 1A and B. Because Harmony Ed required Marissa to start as a 1st grader if we enrolled her I am not going to stress getting through the entire curriculum with her this year. We'll get done what we get done. It's better for her to internalize the concepts than to finish the books. We have the textbooks and workbooks for each level and this year we decided to buy the test books for Audrey.

Music for Little Mozarts (top middle): Both girls will be taking piano this year taught by yours truly. Audrey started last year and is doing really well. I had PLANNED to keep her going all summer so that she'd finish the second set of books, but we didn't get around to it with everything else going on. So she'll have to finish up the second set of books when we start up again. Marissa will start on the first set of books and go from there. Audrey does REALLY well with piano. I think she's got a real natural talent for it. Marissa is very excited to start up. She loves to pretend to play and make up her own songs, which really don't sound too bad!

First Language Lessons (middle of the table): Both girls will start this English book this year. They will learn about verbs, nouns, adjectives, ect. While practicing copy work and memorizing poems.

Preschool Packs (top right): These are for Trent. Thanks to a homeschooling blog I love (http://www.confessionsofahomeschooler.com/) Trent will be learning all 26 letters of the alphabet. There is a pack for each letter. Here are my bags for A and B. We will also be tossing in some fun packs thanks to another site (http://homeschoolcreations.blogspot.com/). Trent is really excited for the Monster Truck pack and the Star Wars Pack. Each pack has many activities such as sorting the Capital and Lowercase letter of the week, counting activities, color matching, shape matching, lacing cards, tracing letters and prewriting activities. They were a lot of work to print, cut, and laminate but worth it as in the end they will have gone through 2 1/2 of my kids.

Story of the World (bottom right): For History this year we've decided to go with Story of the World Volume 2 which covers from the fall or Rome through the beginning of the Renaissance. After skimming through the books I'm really excited to start. The "lessons" are made simple enough for young children to understand the History and written in story format. There are TONS of fun activities in the activity book. We will be doing 4 weeks of learning, followed by a project week where we will do an Activity for each chapter we covered.

Dry Erase Tablets (bottom middle): These are for the girls to practice their handwriting and to do copywork on.

That sums up our curriculum! Once a week the girls will do art and music appreciation with the kits we'll be receiving. PE will be done formally once a week in our Co-op, in addition to our "recess" break at lunch time. Audrey will be doing typing and spelling as well.
It should be a busy busy year filled with lots of fun and learning! I hope it all goes as nicely as it does in my head!

Wow. Props to you! You seem so organized. If I could make it sound that easy in my head, I probably wouldn't be going back and forth so much on homeschooling. Today was Lily's first day in Kindergarten. On the way home she told me that they watch movies and a kid called her a weirdo on the play ground. Why am I sending her to public school? Anyway, I'm VERY excited that you've decided to blog about this.

Tracy you CAN do it if you WANT to do it. Just make sure it's the right decision for you and Lily!! Not to mention the rest of the family. I love it and can give you any advice you'd like or set you up with info. Love ya!

About Us

She's a stay-at-home, homeschool mom of 4 kids. She loves reading, listening to music, playing board games, and hanging out with family and friends.
He works at Teleperformance and is going to school at the OWATC to get into graphic design.